Sunday, October 13, 2013

Sunday Book Roundup

"Sometimes, in the absence of copyright, publishers have paid authors and have abstained from reprinting the books of authors they haven’t paid. Ulysses, by James Joyce, considered by some the greatest novel of the twentieth century, lost its copyright protection in America on a technicality soon after it was published. But from the 1930s to the ’90s, Joyce and his estate were paid royalties from its publication in America anyway, thanks to exactly this kind of happy anarchy. In his new scholarly book Without Copyrights, the legal and literary historian Robert Spoo tells the remarkable tale, which Spoo doesn’t necessarily deem a pretty one. Spoo rather sympathizes, in fact, with the character many observers would consider the villain."

"As its title suggests, Radicals on the Road uses the transpacific journeys of anti-Vietnam War activists as a window into radical American and Vietnamese politics and culture in the 1960s. Its principal claim is as multipronged as its intended audience and intervention: in the 1960s American and Vietnamese antiwar activists created a transnational political community, beyond the confines of any nation-state or locality, based on a sustained critique of U.S. policy in Asia."

"Robert B. Townsend, a longtime deputy director of the American Historical Association (AHA), has written a perceptive study examining the growth and fragmentation of America's historical profession. He begins by reminding readers that professional historians once saw their enterprise "as a vast panorama of activity" encompassing "popular history making, school teaching, and the work of historical societies" (p. 1). For such scholars, the history profession was not just an academic discipline--doing history was about disseminating ideas widely. This is a fitting opening to an analysis that aims to correct teleological understandings of the profession by "recenter[ing] the narrative about history in America on a broader set of professional practices that extend well beyond academia" (p. 5). Townsend's extensive research and clear prose enable him to demonstrate that from the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the interwar years, the historical enterprise splintered into separate professions representing research, pedagogy, and archival practice."